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Fault Protection Design and Testing for the Cassini Spacecraft in a "Mixed" Thruster ConfigurationNASA's Cassini Spacecraft, launched on October 15th, 1997 and arrived at Saturn on June 30th, 2004, is the largest and most ambitious interplanetary spacecraft in history. In order to meet the challenging attitude control and navigation requirements of the orbit profile at Saturn, Cassini is equipped with a monopropellant thruster based Reaction Control System (RCS), a bipropellant Main Engine Assembly (MEA) and a Reaction Wheel Assembly (RWA). In 2008, after 11 years of reliable service, several RCS thrusters began to show signs of end of life degradation, which led the operations team to successfully perform the swap from the A-branch to the B-branch RCS system. If similar degradation begins to occur on any of the B-branch thrusters, Cassini might have to assume a "mixed" thruster configuration, where a subset of both A and B branch thrusters will be designated as prime. The Cassini Fault Protection FSW was recently updated to handle this scenario. The design, implementation, and testing of this update is described in this paper.
Document ID
20150007831
Acquisition Source
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Document Type
Conference Paper
External Source(s)
Authors
Bates, David
(Jet Propulsion Lab., California Inst. of Tech. Pasadena, CA, United States)
Lee, Allan
(Jet Propulsion Lab., California Inst. of Tech. Pasadena, CA, United States)
Meakin, Peter
(Jet Propulsion Lab., California Inst. of Tech. Pasadena, CA, United States)
Weitl, Raquel
(Jet Propulsion Lab., California Inst. of Tech. Pasadena, CA, United States)
Date Acquired
May 8, 2015
Publication Date
August 19, 2013
Subject Category
Spacecraft Design, Testing And Performance
Meeting Information
Meeting: AIAA Guidance, Navigation, and Control Conference
Location: Boston, MA
Country: United States
Start Date: August 19, 2013
End Date: August 22, 2013
Sponsors: American Inst. of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Distribution Limits
Public
Copyright
Other
Keywords
propellant
Reaction Wheel Assembly (RWA)
Main Engine Assembly (MEA)
Titan 4B
Reaction Control System (RCS)
flybys

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